Credit: UNDP Pacific Office
 
In the low-lying small island state of Tuvalu, the government's National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) – administered and implemented by UNDP Pacific Office in Fiji and the Tuvalu government and supported by Global Environment Facility (GEF) – has been addressing marine-based livelihoods and disaster preparedness in the face of rising sea levels.
 
Meanwhile, the 4th International Conference on Small Island Developing States is scheduled to take place in Antigua and Barbuda from 27-30 May.

By Achim Steiner and Carlos Manuel Rodriguez
UNITED NATIONS, May 22 2024 (IPS)

Small island developing states (SIDS) are scattered across the globe, dotting the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean, the west and east coasts of Africa and the Indian Ocean.

These low-lying highly indebted countries are on the frontlines of climate change and natural resource scarcity, already facing the extremes of sea level rise, unpredictable weather events, and environmental degradation that millions more will face tomorrow.

https://www.un.org/ohrlls/content/list-sids

Yet they also are pioneers, innovating and demonstrating what is possible in a shift to a nature-positive future. Emerging technologies and solutions are re-setting economic and societal priorities to value and optimize natural resources and setting forth a path of thriving resilience.

In three decades of working together supporting small islands states, these are the three critical success factors we see emerging from these trailblazing island states as the world looks to transition to a nature-positive future.

One: Nature sits at the heart of this effort.

Nature is the most effective solution to our interconnected planetary crisis and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. It can unlock new and quickly felt benefits of sustainable development.

Ecosystem services underpin key economic sectors in all vulnerable small island states, from fisheries to agriculture to tourism, but these same sectors have historically imposed serious environmental costs. Transitioning these sectors from ‘highly damaging’ to ‘sustainable’, in ways that are investable and profitable while benefiting communities, sits at the heart of our work together.

The new Blue and Green Islands Programme, for example, mainstreams the central role of nature and scales nature-based solutions to address environmental degradation across three target sectors—urban, food, and tourism—for nature-positive shifts in fifteen island states.

Small islands are especially well positioned to benefit from nature-positive economies, counting among them some of the most diverse and unique ecosystems in the world. For them, a nature-positive economy is important not just to stabilize the security of their natural resources and ensure resilient and thriving futures; it assures their role as irreplaceable hosts to many of the world’s migratory and endemic species that make up our global planetary safety net.

Two: Successful solutions touch all aspects of life and livelihoods.

Tackling sea level rise isn’t separate from restoring protective coastal ecosystems, which isn’t separate from rapidly expanding new opportunities in sustainable tourism and sustainable fishing. These expanding opportunities drive sustainable development, bringing jobs, economic prosperity, and resilience.

‘Whole of island’ approaches are now tackling the conservation of land, water, and ocean resources as interconnected issues. These approaches are championing decarbonization and sustainable livelihoods, increasing access to sustainable energy, increasing the ability of communities to adapt to unpredictable or extreme weather, creating jobs, improving opportunities and wellbeing, and achieving sustainable development goals.

The logic of integrated approaches is clear: our lives are deeply interconnected with our environment and our opportunities the world over. The challenge is adapting and shifting systemic norms that are out of step and out of date for the collective future we want. Whole of island issues demands ‘whole-of-society’ inclusion and coordination, across ministries and sectors, building on locally owned and existing structures and initiatives, and seeking private sector engagement and community empowerment at every level.

Today, all our projects undertaken with island states promote integration and inclusion and are designed to ensure that multiple challenges can be addressed at scale and pace simultaneously.

Early efforts through the Integrating Watershed and Coastal Areas Management (IWCAM), the Integrating Water, Land and Ecosystems Management in Caribbean Small Island Developing States (IWEco Project) and the Pacific Ridge to Reef Programme in Pacific SIDS, for example, helped to pioneer the integrated approaches we are seeing today under the global programs in SIDS.

Three: Innovation is the accelerator.

Successful projects demonstrate the disproportionate importance of innovation to turn our most urgent challenges into opportunities for sustainable development. Representing nearly 20% of the world’s exclusive economic zones, many of these islands are incubating new and investable nature-based solutions that can be scaled up to support successful transitions to nature-positive economic sectors and centres of excellence, both in the islands themselves and to the benefit of countries beyond.

For example, with UNDP and GEF support, Seychelles issued the world’s first ‘blue bond’; Cuba mainstreamed nature into policies and practices to reverse degradation of the Sabana-Camagüey ecosystem driven by agriculture, livestock, fisheries, and tourism; and the GEF’s Small Grants Programme supported local communities to ban single-use plastics in the Maldives.

New initiatives with innovative partners such as the Global Fund for Coral Reefs also seek to attract and de-risk private sector investment into local businesses to protect and restore important coral reef ecosystems. These initiatives offer opportunities for integration that are now inspiring similar examples across other islands.

Nothing without partnerships.

A broad and inclusive coalition of government, private sector, civil society, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and other partners is critical to further accelerate nature-positive transformation and increase impact.

New partnerships with the private sector to identify and deploy new business models and instruments to support nature-positive outcomes are also a major part of this effort.

Small Island Developing States have in front of them an opportunity to scale and replicate their successes and make outsized contributions to the implementation of environmental conventions including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (The Biodiversity Plan), the Paris Agreement and the UNCCD Strategic Framework, as well as progress towards their sustainable development goals.

In responding to the most pressing development needs of small island states, the nature-positive economic transitions that are emerging, sector by sector, taking an integrated, innovative and community-informed approach, offer answers to development challenges with applications far beyond their precarious and precious coastlines.

Achim Steiner is Administrator, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); Carlos Manuel Rodriguez is CEO and Chairperson, Global Environment Facility (GEF)

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Kyrgyz Space Program

By Achim Steiner
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 8 2023 (IPS)

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tremendous power of technology and innovation has become clear to the world.
However, it has also increased exclusion, discrimination, and inequalities — especially for women and girls.

On International Women’s Day, we must re-imagine a world whereby innovation and technologies are more intentionally leveraged towards transforming our societies and economies so that resources and power are more equitably distributed.

Women and girls across the globe are anxious for this radical change, and it’s easy to understand why.

There is a growing gender digital divide and a mistaken assumption that the use of digital tools and services will simply increase with universal internet access. 95 per cent of the world’s population has access to a mobile broadband network.

Yet just one-quarter of people in lower-income countries use the internet, with 21 per cent of women in those countries online compared to 32 per cent of men. In tandem, many women and girls — especially women politicians, voters, human rights, and environmental defenders, LGBTIQ+ people, activists, feminist groups, and young women — face widespread forms of violence online, threatening their participation as well as their mental health and wellbeing.

Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator

Digital technology can nurture democracy and human rights by boosting civic engagement and political participation. That includes using behavioural science to help ensure that women can access their property rights in Syria, an effort supported by the UNDP Accelerator Lab there.

Or consider the eMonitor+ platform developed in Tunisia that uses Artificial Intelligence to identify mis/disinformation, hate speech, and violence against women around elections.

Or look to new innovations that are using solar power to capture rainwater and treat it to produce drinking water in Tanzania — allowing women and girls to avoid trekking for kilometres every day to collect water.

At a time when women and girls are denied access to education in countries such as Afghanistan, the STEM4ALL platform coordinated by UNDP and UNICEF aims to increase the representation of women and girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

This network of ‘STEMinists’ plans to expand from 34 countries to a global reach — part of much-need efforts to help ensure that women can lead our new digital societies that will drive forward everything from climate action to the restoration of our natural world.

UNDP is working with key partners like UN Women to support countries to build inclusive digital ecosystems that work for women in all their diversity, guided by our Gender Equality Strategy 2022-2025 and our Digital Strategy 2022-2025.

All of us have a role to play in amplifying women’s voices; women’s participation in public life and access to justice, including through e-governance initiatives.

More efforts are also needed to tackle discrimination and violence against girls with disabilities. And digital finance will be a key means to allow women to gain full control over their finances — perhaps the most powerful means to reduce poverty and advance the Global Goals. In short, women and girls must be an intrinsic part of answering people and planet’s most pressing challenges.

Achim Steiner is Administrator, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

IPS UN Bureau

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UN Volunteers celebrating International Volunteer Day in South Sudan where they serve the United Nations in peace-keeping, midwifery and human rights. (UNV, 2018)

By Olivier Adam and Achim Steiner
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 4 2019 (IPS)

As the world warms, as inequality widens and as an increasing number of societies suffer from instability and conflict, many people are left wondering what they can do about it.

As inspirational changemakers like Greta Thunberg show, you don’t have to start out as a world leader or a celebrity to make a difference. Standing in the street with a protest sign is not for everyone, though. And there are many ways to make a difference.

Every day, an estimated one billion volunteers make a difference to the people and communities where they live and work. They create social bonds and give a voice to marginalized and vulnerable groups. They are often the first to act in moments of crisis. They dedicate their time, skills and passion to make the world a better place.

Right now, nearly 8,000 UN Volunteers, from 18 to 81 years old, serve with over 40 UN partners through the UN Volunteers (UNV) programme, which the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) hosts with great pride — each an ambassador for the importance of volunteerism in development worldwide.

Volunteers help communities to self-organize around their own specific priorities – and support people who are marginalized to tap into mainstream areas of support and public services. That includes UN Volunteers in Asia and the Pacific who have worked at the local level to tackle violence against women and girls.

Mana, who was part of the Partners for Prevention project in Cambodia, noted that many of the participants altered their entrenched attitudes towards gender equality — observing that this, “changed heart and mind can have a long lasting and positive impact on society”.

Or in Pakistan, where the World Health Organization mobilized over 150 UN Volunteers as district monitors to support measles readiness assessment campaigns, targeting 32 million children. As one community member in China put it, volunteers, “…know exactly how to get along with the residents and handle their problems”.

Volunteering also creates relationships and improves critical connections between people. UN Volunteers worked with the UN Mission in South Sudan to create neutral forums to bring conflicted parties together to help build peace.

And in the Philippines, Christian and Muslim volunteers organized and implemented interfaith environmental protection activities — as one of the volunteers noted, this, “…was one thing that we could work on together, it was an eye-opener for us”. The solidarity, empathy and connections generated through social action comes to the fore during crises.

Naw Wan Gay, UN Volunteer providing service for refugees in Baan Mai Nai Soi Temporary Shelter Area, Thailand. (UNHCR, 2016)

During the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, local, national and international volunteers worked together to tend to victims and halt the spread of the disease, despite considerable and cross-border challenges.

Volunteers also strengthen community resilience by integrating refugees and displaced persons, building ownership in the peace and development process and strengthening social cohesion within; and across groups.

In Niger, for example, UN Volunteers working with UNHCR provided much-needed translation and interpretation services to refugees evacuated from Libya — helping to improve the quality of protection and assistance provided to refugees.

New ways of harnessing the power of volunteerism are emerging all the time. Soon after Ecuador experienced a major earthquake in 2016, Zooniverse, a web-based platform for crowdsourced research, utilized 3,000 volunteers and artificial intelligence to review 1,300 satellite images.

Just two hours after the earthquake, a “heat map” of the damage including road blockages was produced to accelerate the disaster response.

The United Nations keenly understands the need to harness the almost limitless power of volunteers bring to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals — a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by the year 2030.

On International Volunteer Day*, we recognize the extraordinary contribution of volunteers to this end. In every part of the globe, they are at the forefront of every major shock and stress, responding to problems big and small that benefit all people.

And as one local volunteer in Myanmar summed it up, “this work can’t be measured in financial terms”. Volunteers are also transforming preconceived notions around who is a productive member of society as volunteerism recognizes the inherent value of all people irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status.

The remarkable results achieved by volunteers to shape that brighter, more inclusive future show that it is worth trying.

That is why they are a such a powerful antidote to a world in flux.

*International Volunteer Day 2019 is marked on 5 December with the theme “Volunteer for an inclusive future“, highlighting Sustainable Development Goal Number 10 and the pursuit of equality – including inclusion – through volunteerism. Learn more about UN Volunteers opportunities here.

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Migrant settlement in Lepe, Spain. Credit: UNDP

By Achim Steiner
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 28 2019 (IPS)

Last week, a too-familiar human tragedy captured news headlines. 39 people were found dead inside a shipping container on an industrial estate in Essex in Southeast England; 31 men and 8 women whose individual identities, for now, remain anonymous, as authorities begin to investigate one of Europe’s worst people-trafficking cases.

While I hope I am wrong, we may never know the stories of those 39 people; why they left their friends and communities to make a perilous, hidden journey to the United Kingdom.

And they are not alone. Just like the 71 migrants found dead inside an abandoned truck in Austria in 2015, or the thousands of men, women and children who have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Europe — over 1,000 already in 2019 — we may never see or remember all their faces.

After the headlines, interest usually moves on, with those who died at risk of becoming 39 statistics, numbers that drive the debate on the strain and stigma of irregular migration.

Achim Steiner. Credit: UNDP

Except, people are not statistics. Every individual on that truck had a unique story that now may not be told.

All the more important, then, to hear from others of their diverse motivations, hopes and fears as they risk their lives to make it to Europe through irregular means, to remind us of the very real people behind the headlines.

This is one of the reasons why the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) embarked on a new study called Scaling Fences, launched last week: to give voice to irregular African migrants to Europe, a subset of migrants of whom many assumptions and judgements are made but about whom, in fact, we have little primary data.

Featuring analysis of interviews with 1,970 migrants from 39 African countries in 13 European nations, all of whom declared that they arrived in Europe through irregular means and not for asylum or protection-related reasons, the report seeks to better understand the age-old relationship between human mobility and human development.

It reaches some counter-intuitive conclusions.

First, it finds that getting a job was not the only motivation to move, that not all the irregular migrants were ‘poor’ in Africa, nor had lower education levels. 58 per cent were either employed or in school at the time of their departure, with the majority of those working earning competitive wages at home. The average age of respondents when they arrived in Europe was 24.

They are of the ‘springboard generation’ – beneficiaries of two decades of remarkable development progress in Africa. Still, some 50 per cent of those working said they were not earning enough.

Mahamadou Sankareh, from Gambia, lives in Rome. He works at the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center. Credit: UNDP/Lena Mucha

Second, it finds that barriers to opportunity, or ‘choice-lessness’, were critical factors informing the calculation of those surveyed; that in spite of development progress at home, 77 percent felt that their voice was unheard or that their country’s political system provided no opportunity through which to exert influence on government.

Third, despite the danger and risks of the fraught journey from Africa to Europe, only 2 per cent of all those people surveyed said that greater awareness of the risks would have caused them to stay at home.

In fact, 41 percent of respondents said ‘nothing’ would have changed their decision to migrate to Europe.

The findings of Scaling Fences confirm some truths that need to be better understood: that migration is really a story of development; that in an unequal world, human mobility both drives and is driven by development progress, albeit progress that is uneven and not fast enough to meet people’s aspirations.

It confirms that people will move in the pursuit of larger freedoms and opportunities, including through irregular means if they believe they must, to create a space for themselves and their families in the kind of world the 17 Sustainable Development Goals are designed to help us all attain.

That they travel through irregular rather than regular migration channels does not diminish the importance of their stories. Rather, it highlights the need to both expand safe, legal pathways for migration, in line with the 2018 Global Compact for Safe Orderly and Regular Migration, and to continue investment in a future-focused Africa of socio-economic and political choice and opportunity.

Although migration in all its forms is sometimes painted as an emergency – a ‘lose-lose’ situation for everyone — it is actually a long-term development trend: one that started long before there were legal frameworks or sovereign borders to cross and one that will continue long into the future, accelerated in today’s globalized, hyper-connected societies.

Understanding how to harness the potential of human mobility to accelerate human development – in the countries that migrants move from and move to – starts by understanding the determination that drives people to scale metaphorical and physical fences towards a better life.

If we can work together to do that, then perhaps it will be one very small step towards preventing such tragedies as we saw unfold last week.

Excerpt:

By Maimunah Mohd Sharif and Achim Steiner
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 17 2018 (IPS)

New York has long been considered a pioneer – in fashion, art, music, and food, just to name a few. Now this city of 8.5 million is leading a shift in how we tackle today’s toughest global challenges like climate change, education, inequality, and poverty.

UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

These issues are at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals, an agenda agreed by all nations in 2015 that chart a path for people, prosperity, and the planet. This July, New York is joining countries at the United Nations to report on its progress and to share experiences, becoming the first city to do so.

It makes good sense for New York and other cities to spearhead progress on these global goals – including the need for decent housing, public transport, green spaces and clean air.

More than half of the world’s 7 billion people currently live in cities, and by 2050 that number will be closer to 70%. By 2030, there will be over 700 cities with more than a million inhabitants.

Urban growth is happening fastest in developing countries, which often struggle to meet the demand for quality municipal services and have little experience in planning. Rapid growth can also push up the prices of housing and energy, and can increase pollution, threatening the health and well-being of millions.

Cities are also financial powerhouses, generating 82% of global GDP, yet they also account for 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions, use 80% of the world’s energy, and generate over 1 billion tonnes of waste per year.

Inequality within cities on issues like income, health, and education are also a big challenge.

Cities are a fulcrum for sustainable development worldwide and crucible for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Unleashing the power of cities to help solve global challenges means linking local plans to national plans, and also to global agendas.

Cities are already showing how to lead by example on one of our most pressing global challenges: climate change.

The global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy is an alliance of cities and local governments working to combat climate change and move to a low-emission and resilient society. This group has commitments from over 9,000 cities and local governments from 6 continents and 127 countries.

The Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco this September is another example of how cities, as well as states, regions, companies and citizens, are coming together to show how every group can do something and accelerate action.

Which brings us back to New York.

Cities are on the frontlines of nearly every global challenge we currently face, and they need to be at the center of our strategy to solve them. The urban development of yesterday will not suffice.

By using the Sustainable Development Goals as their guide, New York is showing how cities can adapt their plans to mirror development plans, allowing them to grow in the most sustainable way possible while creating policies for the things people living in cities need.

Things like jobs, affordable housing, good education, quality health care, clean air and good waste management, just to name a few. Getting cities right can provide opportunities to address poverty, migration, employment and pollution.

We invite all cities to join New York and help lead the way in planning for a shared and sustainable future that benefits all people of the world.

On 17 July 2018, the UN will host an event at the High-level Political Forum: ‘The SDGs in Action – Working together for inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities and human settlements. The event will focus on how cities and human settlement are accelerating progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and contributing to a transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies.

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